News broke on Tuesday that Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, is stepping down. (She is going to work for the British foreign minister David Lammy, one of whose first acts on the job was to try to promulgate a ban on arms sales to Israel.) Elise Stefanik, who has led Congress’s efforts to do something about the anti-Israel mania on college campuses, celebrated the news. Martin Kramer, who has for decades been calling attention to the moral and intellectual decline of Columbia, has a different perspective:

My personal view is that Shafik was probably as good as you could get at a university as corrupted as Columbia, and likely more than Columbia deserved. . . . I thought Shafik showed grit in calling in the NYPD twice: first, to clear the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on South Lawn, and second, to clear Hamilton Hall, which had been forcibly occupied by a mix of students and off-campus radicals. But those decisions are what ultimately doomed her presidency.

More precisely, it was the faculty who made her position untenable. They had already taken umbrage at her Congressional testimony, where she appeared vaguely amenable to disciplining faculty speech. Her decision to call in the police compounded the crisis.

Shafik was born in Egypt to a well-to-do family. In 1966, Nasser’s “Arab revolution” stripped her father, a chemist by training, of his expansive estate and all his property, in a wave of nationalization. . . . Shafik was driven from the land of her birth by an angry and aggrieved nationalism. Now, she’s been driven out of America by another variety of angry and aggrieved nationalism, this time Palestinian.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.